- Researchers are reporting that a medical procedure done decades ago on children with growth-related disorders may have transferred amyloid plaques and caused Alzheimer’s disease to develop in those patients.
- Experts note that the medical procedure in these treatments is no longer used due to safety concerns.
- They add that there’s no evidence that Alzheimer’s disease can be casually transmitted between people.
Researchers are reporting that some people developed dementia at an early after being treated as children for growth-related disorders with injections of a pituitary-derived growth hormone contaminated with brain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
The treatment in these particular cases is no longer used, but researchers say the discovery suggests that Alzheimer’s could — under certain circumstances — be transmitted from one person to another.
The research reached similar conclusions to past studies that reported some of the children injected with cadaver-derived pituitary growth hormone (c-hGH) later died of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease due to contamination of the injections with brain proteins called prions, known to cause the fatal degenerative neurodegenerative disorder.
The new
Studying data on this population, researchers identified eight cases where patients seemingly exposed to amyloid-beta proteins via the injections developed dementia and biomarker changes consistent with Alzheimer’s disease beginning in their 40s — far earlier than most cases of dementia.
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